THE LA RAZA CRIME TIDAL WAVE - “These figures do not attempt to allege that foreign
nationals in the country illegally commit more
crimes than other groups,” the report states. “It
simply identifies thousands of crimes that should
not have occurred and thousands of victims that
should not have been victimized because the
perpetrator should not be here.”
CHARLOTTE CUTHBERTSON

REMEMBER THAT THE 99% TRULY DO GIVE THE 1% A BAD NAME!

The
Great Texas Courtroom Blunder Could Cost Us All

The
Godfather author
Mario Puzo once said one lawyer with a briefcase can steal more money than 100
men with guns. Anyone curious how much can be stolen by an army of lawyers with
briefcases need look no further than an outrageous jury verdict in Texas that
twisted a simple breach of contract claim into a three-quarters of a billion
dollar windfall. The verdict is not just a case study of win-at-all-costs legal
tactics, but a potential watershed that, if not reversed n appeal, could
throttle the development of new technologies and inflict irreparable damage on
intellectual property rights.

The saga begins in 2015 when realty firm Title Source, Inc.
(now Amrock), entered into a $5 million contract with a small startup company,
HouseCanary, for the development of a “revolutionary” mobile app to create
property appraisal reports to predict home resale values. Valuation models are
quite common in the real estate industry, readily seen by home buyers on sites
such as Zillow or Redfin. The data-based algorithm HouseCanary promised to
deliver would be entirely new, with cutting-edge technology and proprietary
data models.

There was just one problem; HouseCanary had no technology to
offer and was wholly incapable of developing any. A prototype of the app was
missing key features and third party testers rated it as “mediocre” – hardly
the “revolutionary” technology promised. HouseCanary demanded more time, but
Amrock instead cut bait and filed a lawsuit to recover the $5 million from the
original agreement. At this point the case was a tidy tale of straightforward
breach, but an army of lawyers had other ideas.

Despite
having a client that failed to deliver on its contractual obligation,
HouseCanary attorneys went full Tony Soprano and countersued, making the
entirely absurd claim that Amrock had stolen and misappropriated their
trade secrets by creating an app to replace the one that was never developed.

This was a bold tactic for a defendant who failed to
establish in court any evidence they had given Amrock any trade secrets to
misappropriate. It’s even more ludicrous given the post-trial sworn testimony
of a HouseCanary executive that the company sold “vapor ware” and stated under
oath, “From my knowledge… there wasn’t anything to steal.” Yet despite this the
jury found in favor of HouseCanary, and then proceeded to award them $706
million in damages (since increased to include interest and attorney fees), an
eyeball-popping figure more in line with the misappropriation of a Picasso than
a non-existent app.

Though the verdict is a fraud, HouseCanary attorneys were masterful in
manipulating the jury by pressing emotional hot-buttons and through sleight of
hand deceit that entirely misled them on the technical aspects central to the
trial. What makes this case especially dangerous is how easy it will be for
other frivolous patent lawsuits to copy this deceptive blueprint and shake down
tech leaders for a big payday. If a $5 million claim can be escalated into a
phony jury award 150 times in size, the consequences for investment into new
technology will be devastating, and will throttle potential agreements for cooperation
in innovation.

When testimony failed to produce any evidence in support of
HouseCanary’s misappropriation claim, their attorneys doubled-down with a fish
tale of their own. They convinced the jury that instead of stealing trade
secrets, Amrock had fed HouseCanary data (which was not, in fact, their data)
into a “magic machine” to reverse engineer a replacement app. Yes, they
actually used the words “magic” and “machine” as the entire basis of their
case. To make it stick, HouseCanary lawyers framed the dispute in terms of a
big, rich, out of town company shoving around a small local operation, and
inflamed the jury by telling them to “send a message” to “corporate America”
that would make the “Wall Street Journal.” In essence Amrock was convicted of being
a successful company from out of town that used magic to deceive a small local
startup.

The
entire case is a cautionary tale that confounds every sensibility. All evidence
points to HouseCanary failing to deliver as promised and breaching the
contract, yet justice was tortured to throttle the party with a viable claim.
This represents a significant danger well beyond the courtroom walls.

When parties can file bogus intellectual property claims, it
scares off both investment and cooperation into developing new technologies and
economic innovations. The bigger the return on investment, the bigger target
one is for a frivolous lawsuit. This has a direct and negative impact on
consumers and economic productivity, cannibalizing progress in the dining hall
of the nearest courtroom.

If this case is not reversed it will give a green light to
every legal jester to pursue a jury award rivaling the GDP of a small country
through outrageous claims of fraud and trade secret misappropriation. It will
certainly corrode patent protections that are the lifeblood of investment in
technology so critical to our economy. Massive damage awards must be paid by
somebody, and in the end, it will be all of us. Let us hope this massive wrong
is set right.

Gerard Scimeca is an attorney and
Vice President of CASE, Consumer Action for a Strong Economy, a free-market
oriented consumer advocacy organization.

BLOG EDITOR'S DEFINITION OF A LAWYER:

ONE WHO HAS BEEN INSTITUTIONALLY TRAINED IN LAW SCHOOL TO LIE, CHEAT, STEAL, ORCHESTRATE PERJURY, COMMIT PERJURY AND GAME THE LEGAL SYSTEM FOR BUCKS.

ONLY CRIMINALS HAVE MORE CONTEMPT FOR THE LAWS THAN THE TYPICAL PARASITIC LAWYER!

To get a whiff of just how corrupted and hypocritical the blue establishment is, a new book from New York Times reporters Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor delivers the goods.

Their upcoming She Said details what they went through to report the Harvey Weinstein story and focuses on the huge network of Weinstein enablers (all of whom were, incidentally, on the Left). Probably the worst character among them was Weinstein's famous feminist attorney, Lisa Bloom, who up until that point, had been a much celebrated defender of sex harassment victims, same as her mother, attorney Gloria Allred.

The Times review, by lefty feminist icon Susan Faludi, is positive, as you might expect, and some of its analysis is off, but nevertheless, it is well worth reading for its awful details about Bloom:

Kantor and Twohey broke the Weinstein story. Their 3,300-word Times article on Oct. 5, 2017, aired allegations against him that had been piling up as whispers and rumors for 30 years. That report, and the ones to follow, were grounded in scores of interviews with actresses and current and former employees, supplemented by legal filings, corporate records and internal company communications that documented a thick web of cover-ups, bullying tactics and confidential settlements. It was bravura journalism.

"We watched with astonishment as a dam wall broke," Kantor and Twohey write of the response to that first article. A day after it was published, so many women phoned The Times to report allegations of sexual harassment and assault against Weinstein that the paper had to assign additional reporters to handle the calls.

But of course. When establishment lefties go after other establishment lefties, you have a classic Man Bites Dog story, and it's naturally going to draw attention.

Here's the lowdown on Bloom:

Maybe the most appalling figure in this constellation of collaborators and enablers is Lisa Bloom, Allred's daughter. A lawyer likewise known for winning sexual-harassment settlements with nondisclosure agreements, Bloom was retained by Weinstein (who had also bought the movie rights to her book). In a jaw-dropping memo to Weinstein, Bloom itemized her game plan: Initiate "counterops online campaigns," place articles in the press painting one of his accusers as a "pathological liar," start a Weinstein Foundation "on gender equality" and hire a "reputation management company" to suppress negative articles on Google. Oh, and this gem: "You and I come out publicly in a pre-emptive interview where you talk about evolving on women's issues, prompted by death of your mother, Trump pussy grab tape and, maybe, nasty unfounded hurtful rumors about you. … You should be the hero of the story, not the villain. This is very doable."

So Lisa Bloom (as well as Lanny Davis, Anita Dunn, and other left wing lawyers affiliated with the Clinton and Obama years), who rushed to defend Weinstein, had a Fusion GPS–style operation to trash Weinstein's accusers by painting them as pathological liars and planting sick stories in the press to do it. And there was a willing media corps that might have done it, but Twohey's and Kantor's story (as well as Ronan Farrow's) was airtight.

Bloom sounded so confident and practiced in her email — it inevitably raises questions about where she learned that sort of thing. Could it be that what's been going on in politics has now started to corrupt the legal profession? And "we'll just have to win," as Bill Clinton famously said, is now the standard for even the supposed idealists who defend sex harassment victims? And easily convert that kind of legal practice into a defense of their predators? Just astonishing what the Left is willing to do, if the reporting is correct.

After that, she went on to get her name in the news on other dear-to-lefties matters, such as advocating on Twitter, at least, for now-exposed-as-politically-motivated Christine Blasey Ford. The lefties clapped.

Here's another problem: Bloom sat on the board of Weinstein's film company and might have (according to more than one source) wanted Weinstein to make it "rain" for her by converting her book on the Trayvon Martin case into a miniseries, meaning big bucks for her, according to the book. If so, all about the money? One wonders how many so-called public interest lawyers on the left might be as susceptible to such a venal thing. Bloom in the end said she made a "mistake" in representing Weinstein for $895-an-hour legal work, according to the book, but it sounds more as though she got caught.

Faludi goes off the rails in her analysis when she claims the #MeToo movement started not with Weinstein, but with Donald Trump.

[Kantor and Twohey's] series of articles in many ways ignited the #MeToo movement, already smoldering in the atmosphere of frustration after reports of Donald Trump's alleged sexual predations (a story that Twohey broke with another reporter) and the release of the "Access Hollywood" tape failed to slow the reality star's march to the White House.

It's always about pinning the pervert on Trump, isn't it? Happened with Jeffrey Epstein, now happening with Harvey Weinstein, a longtime Democrat donor.

Actually, Trump has been accused of bad behavior all right, but Faludi's original argument, that a vast network of leftist establishmentarians protecting the likes of Weinstein is how the whole thing was very different. Trump never had a network of anyone protecting him the way Weinstein (and for that matter, Clinton's other good buddy, Jeffrey Epstein) did. Lanny Davis, a Clinton-affiliated lawyer, was busy defending Weinstein, and he also defended Clinton from news reports of his associations with Epstein. Anita Dunn, the Obama advisor who had a Mao poster on her wall, served as an unpaid "advisor" to Weinstein to protect him, too.

Were Weinstein's and Epstein's donations to Democrat causes what was going on? We know about the mini-series potential deal. But why otherwise prominent Democrats and leftists would leap forward to protect Weinstein -- including even to the point of using Fusion-GPS style smear and plant tactics with a willing press, points to a potential campaign donation nexus, too.

The bottom line here is that Bloom's case and all the others likely cited is an unintentional indictment of the leftist establishment and its astonishing unscrupulousness. It underlines what Lindsey Graham said during the left's Bret Kavanaugh attack: 'Y'all want power and I sure hope you never get it."

Rose McGowan Calls for Harvey Weinstein’s Former Lawyer Lisa Bloom to be Disbarred

Actress and #MeToo activist Rose McGowan has called for Harvey Weinstein’s former attorney Lisa Bloom to be disbarred, following revelations that Bloom — a self-described defender of women and the daughter of lawyer Gloria Allred — sought to discredit McGowan and other actresses who have accused the movie mogul of sexual harassment and assault.

She Said, a new book from the New York Times reporters who broke the Weinstein scandal, reportedly reveals that Bloom tried to discredit McGowan by offering to place articles in media outlets that would portray the Grindhouse actress as unstable.

“I feel equipped to help you handle the Roses of the world because I have represented so many of them,” Bloom wrote in a memo to Weinstein that is excerpted in the book.

“We can place an article re her becoming increasingly unglued, so that when someone Googles her this is what pops up and she’s discredited.”

McGown responded Sunday with a call for Bloom to be disbarred.

“The evil that was perpetrated on me and others was mind bending and illegal. Lisa Bloom should be disbarred,” McGowan wrote on Twitter.

According to the new book, Bloom and Weinstein visited the New York Times the day before the initial article was published in 2017. In that meeting, they sought to discredit actress Ashley Judd and several other accusers as mentally unstable.

Judd has accused Weinstein of sexual harassment and is currently suing him for defamation, alleging that he tried to ruin her career when she rejected his advances.

In another memo excerpted in the book, Bloom told Weinstein: “You should be the hero of the story, not the villain. This is very doable.”

Bloom issued an apology on Sunday but didn’t mention McGowan by name.

“While painful, I learn so much more from my mistakes than my successes. To those who missed my 2017 apology, and especially to the women: I am sorry. Here are the changes I’ve made to ensure that I will not make that mistake again,” she wrote on Twitter.

Like her more famous mother, Bloom has promoted herself as a defender of women, representing victims of harassment and assault.

But her public image as a feminist crusader has collapsed as she has become engulfed in high-profile scandals.

The Daily Beast reported in 2017 that Bloom was prepared to leak files about McGowan’s sexual history to journalist Ronan Farrow.

The Hill reported that Bloom, who represented two of the women who made sexual harassment allegations against President Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign, sought payoffs as high as six figures for her clients.

Using money earmarked for construction projects to build a wall to secure the border “is bad for security of our border” and is “undermining our national security,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Thursday.

President Donald Trump’s decision to reallocate $3.6 billion to fund border wall construction is an “assault on Congress’s power of the purse,” Pelosi said in opening remarks at her weekly press conference:

“The President's decision to cancel $3.6 billion for military construction initiatives makes us less safe by undermining our national security and the quality and life and the morale of our troops. And it dishonors the Constitution of the United States as the President negates the Constitution's most fundamental principle, the principle of checks and balances, the separation of powers and his assault on the Congress's power of the purse.

“The decision is bad for security of our border, for the security of our nation and the well‑being of our children.

“As you recall, the President said that Mexico would pay for the wall. Well, that's not happening. Instead, look who's paying. A prospective middle school, of $62 million in Ft. Campbell, Kentucky - take that money, spend it on the wall. Child care development center at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, $13 million - spend it on the wall. Fire station at Tyndall Air Force Base, that was very much destroyed with Hurricane Michael - $17 million for the President's wall.”

Trump is even thwarting efforts to "deter Russia aggression" by using the money to build a border wall, Pelosi said:

“Look at this, European deterrence initiative to combat Russian aggression: $771.5 million. Taking money to deter Russian aggression and spending it on the wall.”

“The list goes on and on. It's appalling. Not only it's appalling, it's dangerous. It's not right for our children. It dishonors the Constitution, it undermines our security. It takes investment, again, away from our children, and we will be fighting that again and again. It's really – just when you think you've seen it all, the children will pay for the President's wall.”

Spate of illegal alien rapes in sanctuary Montgomery County, Maryland draws large local protest

It's actually finally happening. Hundreds of residents of a very blue Montgomery County, Maryland, are starting to march in the streets against their local government's sanctuary city policies. The policies benefit violent illegal immigrants such as rapists, and county officials have dismissed anyone who might not like it in the same pot as 'neo-Nazis.'

At least eight illegal immigrants have been charged with rape or some other sexual crime in Montgomery County since July 25. In several cases, the victims have been underage girls — one of them was allegedly held at knifepoint as she was raped. The charges have drawn questions over the Promoting Community Trust Executive Order, an executive order signed by Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich in July that largely forbids local authorities from cooperating with ICE agents.

A reported 300 local protesters (and given the press's obvious disdain for them in their reports - I had to sort through a lot of biased, distorted, stories - maybe more), demonstrated against a recent sanctuary city order to block cooperation with ICE agents, leading to a spate of illegal alien rapes on young girls.

Author and investigative reporter Michelle Malkin spoke out, and she noted that her crowd was very diverse. So did several top Republican activists, including Seb Gorka and Judicial Watch's Tom Fitton, signalling that maybe this was a center of action - high profile people like that don't just go to any protest.

Nearby Prince George's County in Maryland, and northern Washington D.C. have also had problems with gruesome murders from these child migrants under sanctuary protection, and have seen community resistence from a well-heeled area, as I noted here, so it's something of a pattern.

We are Montgomery County mothers, grandmothers, professional women and stay-at-home moms who once again call upon all our county elected officials to focus their efforts on protecting everyone in Montgomery County, including the most vulnerable in our county — young women and girls, especially those in our immigrant communities.

Criminals and gang members should not have the opportunity to prey on young girls. What kind of elected officials would choose to give “sanctuary” to those who commit such acts, when they have every opportunity and resource to remove them BEFORE they cause such human devastation.

We are outraged and horrified by the seven rapes in Montgomery County reported in August alone, of innocent young women and girls, some as young as 11 years old.

Further, we are shocked and deeply disappointed that the Montgomery County Council chose to use its official position to issue an outrageously ideological statement. They chose to describe Montgomery County residents and all those who voiced a justifiable and sincere outrage over these reported crimes, as “Neo-Nazi sympathizers” which only foments hate and division in the county, in order to deflect away from their failure as our elected officials.

Here's the piously politically correct statement they referred to, calling anyone who wants ICE to deport illegal immigrants who go on to commit rape as people in the league of neo-Nazis.

Montgomery County is committed to building and maintaining a safe and inclusive community for our residents. Understanding, tolerance, and respect are hallmarks of Montgomery County. Social justice for all is what we strive to achieve in our County...

"You shouldn’t be focusing on seven rapes -- there were like 500 in the county last year," Elrich said. "Our number is actually going down over the years so it’s hardly, for having the growing immigrant population and we’ve got declining crime -- but these two things don’t match with their narrative."

He doesn't seem to understand that if such people weren't in the country in the first place, the rapes wouldn't have happened. Far as he's concerned, these foreigners, same as all other people who've broken U.S. immigration law, all deserve sanctuary protection.

Elrich signed the Promoting Community Trust Executive Order on July 22. In it, county employees including the police are unable to assist federal immigration authorities without of warrant signed by a judge. An administrative warrant or immigration detainer is insufficient.

And most reporting holds a sense that the officials are likely to ignore the matter.

But it's significant that a protest happened. The county is deep blue and overwhelmingly votes for Democrats. Like the bordering Takoma neighborhood of Washington, D.C. which protested the placing of a child migrant detention center in their neighborhood, the sanctuary stuff is getting out of control, with zero balance for the interests of the locals.

Jonathan King attended the protest with his son. King said the order doesn’t go far enough to crack down on illegal immigration.

"The people who’ve been ruling us in Montgomery County have been shoving this stuff down our throat, they say it’s OK, it’s good," King said. "And it’s not okay, there are laws that are being broken."

The Daily Caller reported that it was unlikely that these officials will give a darn, given their dismissal of local protestors as neo-Nazis, but there are signs that the protests could be a beginning - Elrich, in one report, said he was "willing to revisit" where ICE agents can come to pick up convicted rapists and killers. That's far from a statement of righting a wrong, but it is a sign he's feeling the heat.

Good. People like that need to feel as much heat as possible. Maybe these protests signal that a tide may be turning.

Report: California’s Middle-Class Wages Rise by 1 Percent in 40 Years

Middle-class wages in progressive California have risen by 1 percent in the last 40 years, says a study by the establishment California Budget and Policy Center.

“Earnings for California’s workers at the low end and middle of the wage scale have generally declined or stagnated for decades,” says the report, titled “California’s Workers Are Increasingly Locked Out of the State’s Prosperity.” The report continued:

In 2018, the median hourly earnings for workers ages 25 to 64 was $21.79, just 1% higher than in 1979, after adjusting for inflation ($21.50, in 2018 dollars) (Figure 1). Inflation-adjusted hourly earnings for low-wage workers, those at the 10th percentile, increased only slightly more, by 4%, from $10.71 in 1979 to $11.12 in 2018.

The report admits that the state’s progressive economy is delivering more to investors and less to wage-earners. “Since 2001, the share of state private-sector [annual new income] that has gone to worker compensation has fallen by 5.6 percentage points — from 52.9% to 47.3%.”

In 2016, California’s Gross Domestic Product was $2.6 trillion, so the 5.6 percent drop shifted $146 billion away from wages. That is roughly $3,625 per person in 2016.

The report notes that wages finally exceeded 1979 levels around 2017, and it splits the credit between the Democrats’ minimum-wage boosts and President Donald Trump’s go-go economy.

The 40 years of flat wages are partly hidden by a wave of new products and services. They include almost-free entertainment and information on the Internet, cheap imported coffee in supermarkets, and reliable, low-pollution autos in garages.

But the impact of California’s flat wages is made worse by California’s rising housing costs, the report says, even though it also ignores the rent-spiking impact of the establishment’s pro-immigration policies:

In just the last decade alone, the increase in the typical household’s rent far outpaced the rise in the typical full-time worker’s annual earnings, suggesting that working families and individuals are finding it increasingly difficult to make ends meet. In fact, the basic cost of living in many parts of the state is more than many single individuals or families can expect to earn, even if all adults are working full-time.

…

Specifically, inflation-adjusted median household rent rose by 16% between 2006 and 2017, while inflation-adjusted median annual earnings for individuals working at least 35 hours per week and 50 weeks per year rose by just 2%, according to a Budget Center analysis of US Census Bureau, American Community Survey data.

The wage and housing problems are made worse — especially for families — by the loss of employment benefits as companies and investors spike stock prices by cutting costs. The report says:

Many workers are being paid little more today than workers were in 1979 even as worker productivity has risen. Fewer employees have access to retirement plans sponsored by their employers, leaving individual workers on their own to stretch limited dollars and resources to plan how they’ll spend their later years affording the high cost of living and health care in California. And as union representation has declined, most workers today cannot negotiate collectively for better working conditions, higher pay, and benefits, such as retirement and health care, like their parents and grandparents did. On top of all this, workers who take on contingent and independent work (often referred to as “gig work”), which in many cases appears to be motivated by the need to supplement their primary job or fill gaps in their employment, are rarely granted the same rights and legal protections as traditional employees.

The center’s report tries to blame the four-decade stretch of flat wages on the declining clout of unions. But unions’ decline was impacted by the bipartisan elites’ policy of mass-migration and imposed diversity.

In 2018, Breitbart reported how Progressives for Immigration Reform interviewed Blaine Taylor, a union carpenter, about the economic impact of migration:

TAYLOR: If I hired a framer to do a small addition [in 1988], his wage would have been $45 an hour. That was the minimum for a framing contractor, a good carpenter. For a helper, it was about $25 an hour, for a master who could run a complete job, it was about $45 an hour. That was the going wage for plumbers as well. His helpers typically got $25 an hour.

…

Now, the average wage in Los Angeles for construction workers is less than $11 an hour. They can’t go lower than the minimum wage. And much of that, if they’re not being paid by the hour at less than $11 an hour, they’re being paid per piece — per piece of plywood that’s installed, per piece of drywall that’s installed. Now, the subcontractor can circumvent paying them as an hourly wage and are now being paid by 1099, which means that no taxes are being taken out. [Emphasis added]

Diversity also damaged the unions by shredding California’s civic solidarity. In 2007, the progressive Southern Poverty Law Center posted a report with the title “Latino Gang Members in Southern California are Terrorizing and Killing Blacks.” In the same year, an op-ed in the Los Angeles Timesdescribed another murder by Latino gangs as “a manifestation of an increasingly common trend: Latino ethnic cleansing of African Americans from multiracial neighborhoods.”

The center’s board members include the executive director of the state’s SEIU union, a professor from the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the research director at the “Program for Environmental and Regional Equity” at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

Overall, median weekly earnings rose 5% from the fourth quarter of 2017 to the same quarter in 2018, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For workers between the ages of 25 and 34, that increase was 7.6%.

The New York Times laments that reduced immigration does force wages upwards and also does force companies to buy labor-saving, wage-boosting machinery. Instead, NYT prioritizes "ideas about America’s identity and culture.” http://bit.ly/2Zp2u2J

"In the decade following the financial crisis of 2007-2008, the capitalist class has delivered powerful blows to the social position of the working class. As a result, the working class in the US, the world’s “richest country,” faces levels of economic hardship not seen since the 1930s."

BLOG…. SO, WHAT DOES LA RAZA WARREN THINK WILL HAPPEN WHEN SHE HANDS 40 MILLION LOOTING MEXCIANS AMNESTY SO THEY CAN BRING UP THE REST OF THEIR FAMILY???

How the Quest For Power Corrupted Elizabeth Warren

I first met Elizabeth Warren when she was a professor at Harvard Law School, in 2004. She was fresh off the publication of her bestselling book, "The Two-Income Trap." There's no doubt she was politically liberal -- our only face-to-face meeting involved a recruitment visit at the W Hotel in Los Angeles, where she immediately made some sort of disparaging remark about Rush Limbaugh -- but at the time, Warren was making waves for her iconoclastic views. She wasn't a doctrinaire leftist, spewing Big Government nostrums. She was a creative thinker.

That creative thinking is obvious in "The Two-Income Trap," which discusses the rising number of bankruptcies among middle-class parents, particularly women with children. The book posits that women entered the workforce figuring that by doing so, they could have double household income. But so many women entered the workforce that they actually inflated prices for basic goods like housing, thus driving debt skyward and leading to bankruptcies for two-income families. The book argued that families with one income might actually be better off, since families with two incomes spent nearly the full combined income and then fell behind if one spouse lost a job. Families with one income, by contrast, spent to the limit for one income, and if a spouse was fired, the unemployed spouse would then look for work to replace that single income.

Warren's core insight was fascinating: She argued that massive expansion of the labor force had actually created more stressful living and driven down median wages. But her policy recommendations were even more fascinating. She explicitly argued against "more government regulation of the housing market," slamming "complex regulations," since they "might actually worsen the situation by diminishing the incentive to build new houses or improve older ones." Instead, she argued in favor of school choice, since pressure on housing prices came largely from families seeking to escape badly run government school districts: "A well-designed voucher program would fit the bill neatly."

Her heterodox policy proposals didn't stop there. She refused to "join the chorus calling for taxpayer-funded day care" on its own, calling it a "sacred cow." At the very least, she suggested that "government-subsidized day care would add one more indirect pressure on mothers to join the workforce." She instead sought a more comprehensive educational solution that would include "tax credits for stay-at-home parents."

She ardently opposed additional taxpayer subsidization of college loans, too, or more taxpayer spending on higher education directly. Instead, she called for a tuition freeze from state schools. She recommended tax incentives for families to save rather than spend. She opposed radical solutions wholesale: "We haven't suggested a complete overhaul of the tax structure, and we haven't demanded that businesses cease and desist from ever closing another plant or firing another worker. Nor have we suggested that the United States should build a quasi-socialist safety net to rival the European model."

So, what happened to Warren?

Power.

The other half of iconoclastic Warren was typical progressive, anti-financial industry Warren. In "The Two-Income Trap," she proposes reinstating state usury laws, cutting off access to payday lenders and heavily regulating the banking industry -- all in the name of protecting Americans from themselves. While her position castigating the credit industry for deliberate obfuscation of clients was praiseworthy, her quest to "protect consumers" quickly morphed into a quest to create the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau -- an independent agency without any serious checks or balances. But despite her best efforts, she never became head of the CFPB, failing to woo Republican senators. The result: an emboldened Warren who saw her popularity as tied to her Big Government agenda. No more reaching across the aisle; no more iconoclastic policies. Instead, she would be Ralph Nader II, with a feminist narrative to boot.

And so, she's gaining ground in the 2020 presidential race as a Bernie Sanders knockoff. Ironically, her great failing could be her lack of moderation -- the moderation she abandoned in her quest for progressive power. If Elizabeth Warren circa 2003 were running, she'd be the odds-on favorite for president. But Warren circa 2019 would hate Warren circa 2003.

Ben Shapiro, 35, is a graduate of UCLA and Harvard Law School, host of "The Ben Shapiro Show" and editor-in-chief of DailyWire.com. He is the author of the No. 1 New York Times bestseller "The Right Side Of History." He lives with his wife and two children in Los Angeles.

Munro: Cornell Study Shows Stagnant Wages Hurting Marriage in U.S.

Fewer women get married when fewer men earn a decent salary in an unstable economy, says a study from Cornell University.

“Most American women hope to marry but current shortages of marriageable men—men with a stable job and a good income—make this increasingly difficult, especially in the current gig economy of unstable low-paying service jobs,” said lead author Daniel Lichter, a professor at Cornell University. He continued:

Marriage is still based on love, but it also is fundamentally an economic transaction. Many young men today have little to bring to the marriage bargain, especially as young women’s educational levels on average now exceed their male suitors.

The study looked at wages and marriage rates from 2008 to 2017, and concluded that “promoting good jobs may ultimately be the best marriage promotion policy,” says the study, which is titled “Mismatches in the Marriage Market,” and was published in the Journal of Marriage and Family.

The study is useful for the populist wing of the GOP, because it shows that rising wages for men in President Donald Trump’s low-immigration economy is good for women’s romantic aspirations and marriage rates. Other data shows that married people — especially women — are far more likely to vote GOP than single people.

Correspondingly, the bad news about wages and marriage is good news for the Democratic Party, which will get extra votes from women if federal policies continue to suppress wages for American men.

The study did not try to show how marriage rates have been impacted by the various federal policies which have flatlined men’s wages for 40 years.

For example, the federal policy of flooding the labor market with immigrants has flatlined wages nationwide for at least two decades. Also, President Barack Obama’s failure to curb opioids — and his reluctance to favor American workers over ‘DACA’ illegals — helped to push millions of Americans out of the workforce and many into their graves.

The Cornell study validated conservatives’ view that women are different from men, and prefer to marry men who earn a higher wage or salary. The press statement said:

The study’s authors developed estimates of the sociodemographic characteristics of unmarried women’s potential spouses who resemble the husbands of otherwise comparable married women. These estimates were compared with the actual distribution of unmarried men at the national, state, and local levels.

Women’s potential husbands had an average income that was about 58% higher than the actual unmarried men currently available to unmarried women. They also were 30% more likely to be employed and 19% more likely to have a college degree.

Middle-class women have the best chance of finding a man who earns more money, the study says.

Low-income women live among men with very little income, partly because they are in jail or are suffering from drugs. And the many women who earn above $40,000 a year face intense competition for the relatively fewer number of men who make more than $65,000 a year.

This shortage of prosperous men means that many high-income women must marry down, the study said. “Women may instead ‘settle’ for a marital match that falls short of their aspirations in a spouse ... This will be expressed in new patterns of marital hypogamy or downward marital mobility,” the study said.

The problem is worse for women who seek husbands later in life, for example, after spending years in university education:

For example, older women on average were much less likely a suitable marital match ... This is especially true among women who were highly educated ... A 10% increase in age among women with a college degree was associated with a 24.48 percentage point decrease in the likelihood of a suitable match. In contrast, age mattered much less among the least-educated women—those with a high school degree or less who had only a 4.47 percentage point decrease in finding a match. One implication was that delaying marriage, for whatever reason but perhaps especially if pursuing college degrees, had the effect of reducing women’s local-area access to demographically suited marital partners.

Future studies will examine divorce rates among marriages where women recognize that they earn more than their husbands.

Young Americans got a pay raise of 7.6 percent from late 2017 to late 2018 -- bigger than other groups -- b/c they are more likely to switch jobs in Trump's low-immigration economy. http://bit.ly/2lWHQUD

Border Patrol Has Arrested More Than 400 MS-13 Gang Members In 2019

The United States Border Patrol Chief Carla Provost released data regarding the number of gang members apprehended by her men and women in her agency during the 2019 fiscal year through August. According to Provost, BP has arrested at least 445 individuals from the notorious Mara Salvatruchaa gang.

"This fiscal year through August, Border Patrol agents have encountered & arrested 933 criminal gang members. Some smuggling, some being smuggled, some sneaking in, and some already here," Provost tweeted.